What Does It Feel Like to Create Today’s Music? BETTE MIDLER By Loraine Alterman
July 20, 1974
“This isn’t what I want my career to be, but what the fates do to me and what and where my audiences carry me.
It’s something that you can’t do by yourself. It has to be in concert–they love you and you love them back; it all comes from that.
I don’t want to make a movie and I’m not interested in doing a play. I want to work out all the things I have to say within the framework of the music. My show is a show, not an act, and there’s a very subtle difference.
An act is not as honest as I’m trying to be.
What I do is very theatrical but it’s also very musical. There are some places that I haven’t been to with it yet. You see, I am ‘Miss M,’ and that is one point that is both a drawback and an advantage.
Some people come only to see ‘Miss M’–the image of Bette Midler–not the real Bette Midler. Some people come to see Bette Midler and wish ‘Miss M’ would take a dump. But I feel that it’s all one.
I want people to understand that all the songs and all the experiences and all the glitter and all the words all come from me, from one person, from one personality. And that’s what I have created. That’s the way I express myself. I can’t paint and I don’t write very well, so that is the expression of me. And I have other things that I want to say and I will be expressing myself until I run dry.”
